open source marketer and community manager

marketing

I trust Mozilla to do the right things… in general. I trust so much that I agree to share Firefox telemetry data to its server. I trust Mozilla to hold my traffic data, bookmarks etc with Sync. The thing is that I remember being informed of those options the first time I start Firefox on a new machine. Trusting Mozilla and Firefox is a choice I make, even if it’s the default one.

I didn’t like waking up and reading that Mozilla partnered with a TV show and silently installed an add-on on my computer. I don’t care what that add-on does: Mozilla sneaked it in on my computer. I don’t remember seeing any notification upon restarting Firefox, like “Hey, we partnered with XYZ Corp to collect anonymous data and do something great with it” or “Sorry, we just need to make money… It’s all good, we keep everything private as usual and no marketing bozos will bother you… Do you mind not changing the default and let this add-on run?”

Nintendo presented the new gaming console and a new business strategy. The first thing that struck me is the silly name: I don’t get it, sounds primitive, too many vowels. Try to say it out loud and tell me it sounds good.

Then I saw the controller and the demos: WOW! Not. The Wii was a masterpiece of human interaction design: simple and effective, it expanded gaming to a whole new set of gamers. Its simplicity was the distinctive feature that allowed Nintendo to stay in the market. Wii U’s controller instead seems hard, complex and confusing. Look at the picture below: which screen should you be watching? All those buttons… how should be holding that thing: flat? vertical?

More puzzling it’s the marketing choice to go back to the crowded space where the leaders are PS3 and Xbox. Why would Nintendo decide to leave its lucrative new niche and go back to fight directly against Sony and Microsoft?

When I read that Asus announced to ship three new models of its Eee PC with Ubuntu I was excited. Then I went on to read the full announcement and I found out ath

NETBOOK INNOVATOR Asustek has announced that it will ship three models of its Eee PC with Ubuntu 10.10 preinstalled.

It will ship Ubuntu’s older version, 10.10 while now we are at 11.04. So the first thing that Asus customers will see when they boot the machine and connect it to the internet is a cute screen that says “There is a new version of your operating system. Do you want to upgrade?” What? I just spent $ for this new system and it’s obsolete? And it’s not going to be a simple system update or a ‘service pack’: it’s a whole new version of the OS, different GUI and more.

If they’re selling these machines at the Ubuntu (or general GNU/Linux) fans there is no problems as we’re used to fast upgrades. But if Ubuntu and Asus are aiming at Windows users, as it seems, I think they have to make an effort not to welcome their new customers with a message that can be read as:

I spent a few hours listening to Intel’s presentation about Meego and the new app store (another) from Intel. AppUp, the name of the store, is just another store. The only new thing that I remember is that AppUp allows to integrate other stores into this store… For example, if you published an app on AppUp, this will also appear on BestBuy’s app store. Not sure what to make of that: as with many other features of the afternoon, I and others in the audience were not impressed.

Intel will review and validate every app submitted in the store and, contrary to Apple’s total opacity, they have published the validation guidelines. The validation process will take ‘at most’ 7 business days and every updated version of the app will have to go through the validation process again. The developers in the room didn’t like that: it’s a huge problem because if your release has a bug, it may take over a week to send a fix to your users.

Admittedly, this validation process is a hard nut to crack but one would expect that a new app store would at least try. I would suggest Intel to give up the subjective control on the ‘objectionable content’ and relegate porn material in a section of the store behind an additional credit card. I would make this section graphically anonymous and before anybody can access it, they have to enter a credit card number, all the time. Developers that publish bad content out of the porn-wall are permanently banned. Fool proof? No, but neither is the existing system with Apple constantly under fire for its decisions to pass or block apps.

My advice: put automatic checks in place for malware and trust your developers until they screw it up. You can also imagine a crowdsourced moderation system after the publication of the app. A model based on trust may not work but at least it would give Inte’s AppUp a differentiating factor compared to the leading stores.

I’m glad that Jorg Janke shared his experience of developing a commercial open source business with Compiere because you learn from failures as well as success. His long piece has some interesting parts, but what caught my attention most is the various experiments in the sales and revenue model. Janke says

Compiere certainly did not fail due to its technology. It failed due to lack of sales and marketing expertise, execution and the wrong bet to “upgrade” open source minded partners and customers to a traditional, commercial model.

Compiere’s experience shows that it’s very difficult to change the terms of an existing relationship with your community, developers/contributors and channel. It’s not enough to balance proprietary and open source components but you also need to keep the whole ecosystem happy while doing so. You need to make sure your community feels your love: that’s what Compiere failed to do.

Yesterday I went to listen to the conference where MIP, Politecnico Business School, published the results of the research about Mobile Marketing and Services. The research was based on 200 case studies, involving all the major actors of the supply chain (advertising investors, media buyers, creative agencies, telecom operators’ and service providers) and also a survey focused on marketing directors of medium and big enterprises.

The good things are that mobile is being more pervasive and it’s starting to extend beyond the cell phone to netbooks and gaming consoles. And that over 70% of the Italian mobile users are of age between 25 and 55, so in their full spending power.’ The youngest group, 18 to 25, is just 11%; this seems to contradict the myth that mobile ads are only good to target youngers.’ I’ve also learned that location-based advertising is being held back because of privacy issues. In Italy the fact that Mario Rossi is *now* in Via Carlo Farini, Milano cannot be passed from the mobile operator to the advertiser.’ It seems that this is a grey legal area that lawyers are trying to sort out.

Strangely, Google was not present.’ I didn’t hear the word Google or Adwords connected to the mobile world. But according to the slides presented by Niumidia, 30% of the users that access TIM/Virgilio WAP portals do it to use the search.’ It seemed as if mobile web is a different thing from the desktop web. Are we so far away from having full web experience on mobile handsets that it’s too early to say goodbye to those depressing WAP portals?

I was surprised that for Dada (Vodafone) and Niumidia (TIM), mobile advertising is SMS, MMS/VMS and banners on WAP portals. They still have made no plans for mobile email. I found it strange because ‘smart phones’ are being sold in huge numbers (40M last quarter,’ 27% increase since Q2) and when users get a new powerful phone they want to get their email on it.’ Am I missing something?